On Mentoring

My friend Joe Murray, 78 years young and still working as a field forester in the Pysht area of the Olympic Peninsula, passed away last month. Fittingly, he was in between tasks in the woods he loved so much, when he passed.

I met him in his late 60s, got to know him in his early 70s, and like most people in his orbit, I took to his wisdom, patience, and understatements. When Joe spoke, he always led with questions and a fundamental curiosity. When giving advice, he came at conversations from angles I didn't fully understand. But I knew he had many angles - life, love, loss, birth, growth, work, community, education, friendship - just to name a few. When he spoke about science or trees or pickup trucks or building community, he was giving you 70-something years of his experience. The good, the bad, the trials, and the tribulations: they all informed whatever understated, soft-spoken advice he would give, or whatever professorial statement, rooted in hard won professional experience (read: rainy time in the Sitka spruce forests and alder), that he would make. 

Like the consonant "e," the way that he came to the conclusion he presented to you was often silent, but you could tell that he spent a long time to get there. There wasn't any explanation of "I screwed this relationship up..." or "I would have done this differently with my teenage sons" or "we only burn on the Peninsula when the relative humidity is below..."

And that was fine. Perfect, really.

As young (and middle-aged, and younger old) men, we so often want for mentorship, insight from other, wiser, older men who have seen and done, lived and risen, fallen, and gotten back up again. Their advice is born of unspoken pain, born of unspoken joy, and the transitions between the two can make us better, wiser, more noble versions of ourselves. Male-to-male mentorship is hard to come by, but I always relished being taken under the wings of coaches and professors, senior bandmates or teammates, (good and shitty) bosses and (and great) ski touring partners.

Not every mentoring moment or mentoring advice comes with an explanation. It often comes with a simple assertion - a few sentences long - but one that took decades to form. These aren't the deep, intimate, vulnerable connections that make for engaging conversations that can run hours at a time, the kind of mentoring that you know when you've experienced it. These are the subtle, "hey kid, if you look over here, you might see a spot you missed," moments, the ones that are given because people care, have some experience, and want to share just enough to be useful. These understated mentors might even be embarrassed to be called mentors, but we'll remember them as such, all the same.

Sharing their flaws, their foibles, their fuck ups, sometimes in parenthetical, pithy sentences when the tailgate pops and the boots get loosened, or when the rain slows on the bigleaf maple leaves and spoken words can be heard again. 

These men, like Joe Murray, are the unintentional mentors. And we appreciate them, and their wisdom.

In August 2026, I went for a run with a friend and we talked about, well, old men. Then I scribbled an email note to two other friends about an old man, Joe Murray. This essay/remembrance is the result of that. I'm grateful for the friends who let me reflect on the topic, much as I am grateful for Joe.